Last Talk With Lenin

I went to see Lenin the day after the Review in the Red
Square, and the general holiday in honour of the Third
International. The first thing he said was: "I am afraid that
the Jingoes in England and France will make use of
yesterday's doings as an excuse for further action against
us. They will say 'How can we leave them in peace when
they set about setting the world on fire?' To that I would
answer, 'We are at war, Messieurs [gentlemen]! And just as during
your war you tried to make revolution in Germany, and
Germany did make trouble in Ireland and India, so we,
while we are at war with you, adopt the measures that are
open to us. We have told you we are willing to make
peace.'"

He spoke of Chicherin's last note, and said they based all
their hopes on it. Balfour had said somewhere, "Let the fire
burn itself out." That it would not do. But the quickest
way of restoring good conditions in Russia was, of course,
peace and agreement with the Allies. "I am sure we could
come to terms, if they want to come to terms at all.
England and America would be willing, perhaps, if their
hands were not tied by France. But intervention in the
large sense can now hardly be. They must have learnt that
Russia could never be governed as India is governed, and
that sending troops here is the same thing as sending them
to a Communist University."

I said something about the general hostility to their
propaganda noticeable in foreign countries.

Lenin. "Tell them to build a Chinese wall round each of
their countries. They have their customs-officers, their
frontiers, their coast-guards. They can expel any
Bolsheviks they wish. Revolution does not depend on
propaganda. If the conditions of revolution are not there no
sort of propaganda will either hasten or impede it. The war
has brought about those conditions in all countries, and I
am convinced that if Russia today were to be swallowed up
by the sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the revolution
in the rest of Europe would go on. Put Russia under
water for twenty years, and you would not affect by a
shilling or an hour a week the demand, of the
shop-stewards in England."

I told him, what I have told most of them many times, that I
did not believe there would be a revolution in England.

Lenin. "We have a saying that a man may have typhoid
while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had
abortive typhoid, and was going about with it,
had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well,
England and France and Italy have caught the disease
already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the
microbe is already there."

I said that just as his typhoid was abortive typhoid, so the
disturbances in England to which he alluded might well be
abortive revolution, and come to nothing. I told him the
vague, disconnected character of the strikes and the
generally liberal as opposed to socialist character of the
movement, so far as it was political at all, reminded me of
what I had heard of 1905 in Russia and not at all of
1917, and that I was sure it would settle down.

Lenin. "Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative
period, in which the English workmen will come to realize
their political needs, and turn from liberalism to Socialism.
Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist
movements, your socialist parties . . . when I was in
England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a
country with so large an industrial population they were
pitiable, pitiable . . . a handful at a street corner . . . a
meeting in a drawing room . . . a school class . . . pitiable.
But you must remember one great difference between
Russia of 1905 and England of to-day. Our first Soviet in
Russia was made during the revolution. Your
shop-stewards committees have been in existence
long before. They are without programme, without
direction, but the opposition they will meet will force
a programme upon them."

Speaking of the expected visit of the Berne delegation, he
asked me if I knew MacDonald, whose name had been
substituted for that of Henderson in later telegrams
announcing their coming. He ,said: "I am very glad
MacDonald is coming instead of Henderson. Of course
MacDonald is not a Marxist in any sense of the word, but
he is at least interested in theory, and can therefore be
trusted to do his best to understand what is happening here.
More than that we do not ask."

We then talked a little on a subject that interests me very
much, namely, the way in which insensibly, quite apart
from war, the Communist theories are being modified in the
difficult process of their translation into practice. We
talked of the changes in "workers' control," which is now a
very different thing from the wild committee business that
at first made work almost impossible. We talked then of
the antipathy of the peasants to compulsory communism,
and how that idea also had been considerably whittled
away. I asked him what were going to be the relations
between the Communists of the towns and the
property-loving peasants, and whether there was
not great danger of antipathy between them, and said
I regretted leaving too soon to see the elasticity of
the Communist theories tested by the inevitable
pressure of the peasantry.

Lenin said that in Russia there was a pretty sharp
distinction between the rich peasants and the poor. "The
only opposition we have here in Russia is directly or
indirectly due to the rich peasants. The poor, as soon as
they are liberated from the political domination of the rich,
are on our side and are in an enormous majority."

I said that would not be so in the Ukraine, where property
among the peasants is much more equally distributed.

Lenin. "No. And there, in the Ukraine, you will certainly
see our policy modified. Civil war, whatever happens, is
likely to be more bitter in the Ukraine than elsewhere,
because there the instinct of property has been further
developed in the peasantry, and the minority and majority
will be more equal."

He asked me if I meant to return, saying that I could go
down to Kiev to watch the revolution there as I had
watched it in Moscow. I said I should be very sorry to
think that this was my last visit to the country which I
love only second to my own. He laughed, and paid me the
compliment of saying that, "although English," I had more
or less succeeded in understanding what they were at, and
that he should be pleased to see me again.